What can we really learn from the 2012 polls?

posted at 6:51 pm on November 12, 2012 by Karl

The main things we know about the 2012 campaign polling is that Republican (and GOP-leaning) polling generally missed, and conservative pundits generally misjudged the polls (even if some of their criticisms of specific polls were accurate). However, much of the conventional wisdom curdling around the polling and analysis thereof is not only misguided, but risks misjudging polls in the future.

For example, it is increasingly said that conservatives were “poll deniers.” It is far more accurate to say that conservatives chose to trust national polling which tended to show Pres. Obama tied to narrowly losing over state polling which tended to show him winning. There were reasons to do so. Hindsight does not necessarily make those reasons unreasonable.

A variation on this theme I have seen from media types on and off Twitter is to suggest that various state pollsters, e.g., Marist were vindicated, while Rasmussen and Gallup were embarrassed. To be sure, a number of state pollsters got closer to the final result than Ras or Gallup in this cycle. But if we are to believe in the superiority of poll averages over individual (and in general, we should), then we are to believe that right-leaning polls will be balanced out against left-leaning ones. There are those who argue for following a few trusted polls, or weighting them for more accurate results. However, I suspect that if elections were not years apart, we might discover such people are like the those stock-pickers who claim to be able to beat the market; you may be able to do it for a while, but not over the medium term. Those who spent the cycle attacking Ras and Gallup while not mentioning their counterparts on the left were rooting for their team, not for the “science” part of public opinion polling.

The reason these observations may seem counter-intuitive this year is that, according to no less an authority than Nate Silver, Obama beat the polling consensus. Indeed, as Silver notes, the pollsters which tended to do best were partisan Democratic firms like Mellman, Grove Insight, and PPP. If the establishment media were actually neutral, this sort of performance by the polling industry would be more of a story… but they aren’t and it isn’t.

Fortunately, New York magazine’s Jason Zengerle caught PPP’s Tom Jensen in a post-elex gloating mood, and the non-gloating parts are quite instructive:

*** Jensen conceded that the secret to PPP’s success was what boiled down to a well informed but still not entirely empirical hunch. “We just projected that African-American, Hispanic, and young voter turnout would be as high in 2012 as it was in 2008, and we weighted our polls accordingly,” he explained. “When you look at polls that succeeded and those that failed that was the difference.” Given the methodological challenges currently confronting pollsters, those hunches are only going to prove more important. “The art part of polling, as opposed to the science part,” Jensen said, “is becoming a bigger and bigger part of the equation in having accurate polls.”

GOP pollsters made the opposite assumptions and fared very poorly. But note this has little to do with the “science” part of polling.

And what of the less-wrong, nonpartisan state polling? What was their secret? Some will say avoiding robopolling, and that is likely partially true. However, it is easy to find live pollsters who blew it (Gallup, ARG, NPR, AP-GfK) and robopollers (and internet pollsters) who did not (Survey USA, We Ask America, YouGov). In addition to tech issues, one explaining factor seems to be how tightly or loosely likely voters were screened. Those who used traditional, tight screens, like Gallup and the NBC/WSJ national poll, tended to fare worse than pollsters who used loose to virtually non-existent screens, like SUSA. I tend to think those screening decisions may have been driven not by political leanings, but by the economic realities of securing steady work from media clients in local markets, especially in a limping economy. For example, SUSA’s polls often pass through over 90% of registered voters as likely voters, while the NBC/WSJ poll tends to pass-through closer to 80%. In the case of this year’s NBC/WSJ national poll, this tended to shrink the Democratic margin from D+5 to D+3. Turns out having a traditional likely voter screen was a disadvantage this year, but it is tough to see how thinking screening protocols developed over decades of experience was somehow unscientific.

What is obvious to most in hindsight is that the GOP pollsters, and a number of nonpartisan pollsters, ended up screening out young and minority voters using more traditional methods. Although Obama’s ability to turn out hispanic voters in key states was part of the reason they were wrong, the real story nationwide and in states like Ohio was high black turnout (which has much less to do with demographic shifts than could be said of the hispanic vote).

As a result, the state of the 2012 polling offers more questions than lessons. It is easy (and not wholly inaccurate) to mock Pres. Obama and his core supporters as a cult of personality. The more neutral way of putting this would be that Pres. Obama is an historic candidate who inspires minorities (again, more black than hispanic) and young people (again, more minority young people than white youngsters, if the exit poll is to be believed). And Obama’s campaign was highly effective in getting these blocs to vote.

The first question to be asked is whether this effect is limited to Obama, or has his candidacy turned these demographics into more habitual voters? If anyone might be in a position to answer that question, it would be someone like senior Obama adviser David Plouffe. And yet Plouffe seems uncertain about the fate of the Obama for America operation:

So what happens to the now-legendary Obama campaign machine that’s been operational for nearly six years? The Obama team said they would have to wait and see what their supporters want before taking any steps.

“We’re going to go through a process with our supporters, and have conversations with them about what they want to do next,” Messina said. “We’ve always listened to the ground.”

David Plouffe, the White House senior adviser who led Obama’s 2008 campaign, echoed those remarks, saying “you can’t just transfer” the Obama campaign machine to another candidate.

“People are not going to spend hours away from their families and their jobs, contributing financially when it’s hard from them to do it, unless they believe in the candidate,” he said.

In short, the conditions that produced the failings in most 2012 polling may not occur in 2016. But the GOP may not be able to risk assuming that they will not. Consequently, the real story of 2012 polling may not be separable from all of the other debates the right is currently having about its future. Conversely, the left, having won by more than predicted, may make the mistake of assuming 2012 is the new normal, when it may not be.

Blowback

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It is far more accurate to say that conservatives chose to trust national polling which tended to show Pres. Obama tied to narrowly losing over state polling which tended to show him winning. There were reasons to do so. Hindsight does not necessarily make those reasons unreasonable.

But it does make them wrong.

But if we are to believe in the superiority of poll averages over individual (and in general, we should), then we are to believe that right-leaning polls will be balanced out against left-leaning ones. There are those who argue for following a few trusted polls, or weighting them for more accurate results. However, I suspect that if elections were not years apart, we might discover such people are like the those stock-pickers who claim to be able to beat the market; you may be able to do it for a while, but not over the medium term. Those who spent the cycle attacking Ras and Gallup while not mentioning their counterparts on the left were rooting for their team, not for the “science” part of public opinion polling.

Agreed. This is why I was frequently posting projections about the electoral college using the state RCP averages as a baseline.

As a result, the state of the 2012 polling offers more questions than lessons.

Actually, the best lesson is this: the primary means of criticizing a poll should be the poll’s methodology, not its results. Pollsters openly admitted that they weren’t weighting by party ID because it was an attitudinal variable. They turned out to be right.

THe democrats have the perfect cheating system around. at first 1 county had 110 , then another at 120 then 130 and the last one reported 141 voter turn out. 147,000 voters and 18?,000 voted!
Really? and in some areas of philly romney got ZERO percent of the vote!. So they are cheating and WE GET TO GET OUR COLLECTIVE SHIT TOGETHER TO PUT A STOP TO IT!

They’re worthless because they don’t take into account 120-150% turnout over possible registered voters in Dem districts. They don’t take into account ZERO votes in dozens of swing state precincts for Romney.

The rational thing is to consider all polls and assume their average will be a good indication of where things stand. RCP predicted that Obama was winning every swing state except North Carolina and Florida.
Obama did end up winning Florida, but RCP was otherwise correct.

ALL the polling aggregates (RCP, Nate Silver, Huffpost, Polltracker, Votamatic, Sam Wang etc, etc) were right on the money. So, taking stock of all polls is the sensible thing to do.

In the article linked below, Michael Barone says the Philly turnout should arouse suspicion, and the PA Speaker of the House calls it “questionable” and predicts that when the official count is finished, there will be more people voting than actually signed in at the poll book.

I would argue the assumptions made by non-left wing pollsters were indeed wrong but were not just reasonable but almost unavoidable if you are not a left wing partisan.

Every pollster assumed voting would be down from 2008 levels. Rightly as many voted for an idea of what Obama was which has gone up in smoke years ago. They were right. Voting was down from 2008. Obama got millions less votes this year than 2008. What no one saw coming was that voting would collapse to around 2004 levels.The only way that happens is if many less voted for Romney too. That is also the only way a massive turnout of the Democratic base, which is much more minority than the general population, get’s Obama reelected and produces the kind of exit polls we see which is Dem +6.

Yes,in the end Romney may just match McCain’s total from 2008. But there are 10 million more eligible voters than 2008, nearly 60% of whom, 6 million, should have voted in this election. McCain could rightly point to Obama’s massive total in 2008 and say that many, including Republicans, preferred Obama and that is why he could not match Bush 2004. It is hard to suggest this is true for Romney. Especially given the idea that Romney got more people who said they were independents than McCain. The only conclusion is that many who would call themselves Republican did not vote. That is just not something a pollster could reasonably assume prior to the election in IMHO.

I’m guessing you misunderstood prior posts in which I have suggested, based on a number of studies, that candidate ideology doesn’t matter all that much. If you want to claim that a more conservative candidate would have brought out more rural conservatives, you can do that. But there’s no guarantee a more conservative nominee wouldn’t have also increased turnout on the other side.

I agree, but, the democrat party has now found what works for them. A candidate that people will vote for because, well, they are people of color. I am sure they are scouring the demographics to find the next black candidate for Potus. Perhaps this time they will be full on African American. We are already aware that experience and a failed record do not seem to bother the voters that vote simply because of race.

I mean seriously? Re-elected In this climate? Failed economy, no budget? The list goes on.

Did GumbyPokey get banned, or did his contract with Organizing for America run out?

Glenn Jericho on November 12, 2012 at 7:18 PM

Not sure if you know this but the president WON and your savior Romney LOST. Queen Ann was also unable to return the drapes she bought for a full refund after the first debate.
His work here is done i suppose.

I’m guessing you misunderstood prior posts in which I have suggested, based on a number of studies, that candidate ideology doesn’t matter all that much. If you want to claim that a more conservative candidate would have brought out more rural conservatives, you can do that. But there’s no guarantee a more conservative nominee wouldn’t have also increased turnout on the other side.

Karl on November 12, 2012 at 7:20 PM

Very simple methodology here, mind you it’s just throwing stuff at the wall and see what sticks etc. But when you have two losing moderates in a row — and this year’s model gathered fewer votes than last prez cycles model even though Teh One had a nice fat juicy record to attack — and given the fact that last cycle’s model also had a running mate that the conservative base was enthusiastic about — I’d say ideology plays much more of a role than, say, “time bomb” allegedly game-changing jobs reports or the price of gas, wouldn’t you?

He was outed as an Obama campaign worker. I imagine we won’t see him again unless he works on another campaign.

Doomberg on November 12, 2012 at 7:21 PM

I heard here at HA that he was outed at Ace’s Place (or something like that. I don’t go there.), I was just wondering about his status here.

And did Ace post this “outing” of Gumby (and if so, could you link)? I don’t doubt it a bit that he was an Obama plant. He held up his conservative shtick for about a solid week and then it was over. I am curious though how one would actually go about proving that he was an Obama shill…

Nate Silver was correct because he was shown the fraud model that the White House was working off of. And many of the polls wrongly inflated Obama’s numbers so that the final fraudulent result didn’t look to obvious.

We can only guess how many polls played with the numbers either out of solidarity with the Chicago gang, or because they were bought off or bullied by them.

But the White House really screwed up by stealing Florida. Polls overwhelmingly showed Romney winning. Even Axelrod early on election night conceded that they wouldn’t end up winning that one. Allen West’s recount should show by what methods Florida was stolen along with the other swing states.

CIRCLE is a group with a particular agenda. Note they don’t go out of their way to note that turnout as a % of the population went way up in general between 2000 and 2004. They were 17% of the total in 2004 and… 18% in 2008. It increased to 19% in 2012, per the exit poll. It’s the demographics of the youth vote that are shifting, although again this is more on the hispanic side than the black side. And as one of the articles linked above suggests, it’s possible that nationally, the overall hispanic vote was flat this year compared to 08.

well, the question is why did PPP put their thumb on the scale? and why did Axelrod demand that Gallup do the same thing?

i think part of the issue in the early voting and absentee voting. the traditional screen no longer work because is is Much easier and a lot more FUN to vote. Now you can go get some pizza hang out, vote, and who knows, get a date.

so barry maybe didn’t get many people at his stops late in the cycle because they had Already VOTED…pretty much of a drag to stand for hours to listen to someone give a speech.

so Rs will have to have voting parties, pizza and vote parties. Parties in the basement of their churches to fill out their ballots…and have a pot luck dinner

We need to have FUN guys. It is a GROUP thing…party down and vote for Rubio…si se puede

Nate Silver was correct because he was shown the fraud model that the White House was working off of. And many of the polls wrongly inflated Obama’s numbers so that the final fraudulent result didn’t look to obvious.

sartana on November 12, 2012 at 7:38 PM

Oh, come on now. Dem fraud in elections is nothing new. It isn’t “we was robbed!”. It’s “Mitt Romney lost”. We can try to fool ourselves that these things aren’t ideologically-driven, but the fact is that many people were banking on a turnout that would be, if not a repeat of the 2o1o turnout, at least a dead-even D-R split on an ideological basis. And it didn’t happen because no really stark ideological difference has been outlined by the GOP since the “TP” elections of 2010.

What we learned from the polls is we need to educate the voters, on both sides.

We learned that when you let the democrats say lies about the republican candidate it works and you need to fight back with the real truth and not let it slide. Rolling over and thinking nobody could believe that just doesn’t work. To many gullible voters out there.

For example, it is increasingly said that conservatives were “poll deniers.” It is far more accurate to say that conservatives chose to trust national polling which tended to show Pres. Obama tied to narrowly losing over state polling which tended to show him winning.

It’s simply not true that conservatives chose to trust national polling. They were denying that the national average was accurate at the end as well. Maybe there were good reasons to (though I’m pretty skeptical), but saying they trusted national polling isn’t correct.

yeah, it is stupid to credit nate silver with anything…oba probably gave him their internals (with whatever ‘fudge’ factors they use)…the one’s that no one else can afford

and since PPP is a D pollster, there’s no reason to think that axelrod didn’t give them the inside scoop either.

i don’t trust exits much…but this was a low turnout vote…Rs usually do well in that senario…gallup was RIGHT ON when they said that it would be lower than 08 and 04….hmmmmmmm…their polling was pretty good on that..

David Plouffe, the White House senior adviser who led Obama’s 2008 campaign, echoed those remarks, saying “you can’t just transfer” the Obama campaign machine to another candidate.

The point I have been making to my GOP friends who are hand-wringing over what the party should do now is based on the above comment.

The Dems know the reason they got the turn-out they did was because they had a minority candidate at the top of the ticket, and they used that to stoke support among minority voters. This won’t work with another white guy, and probably won’t work for Hillary either.

So they have a problem too….who will they run in 2016?? At least they are acknowledging this could be a problem. We are still stuck on what “we did wrong” nonsense.

Realizing this, we need to stop Amnesty since all this will be is a Dem voter registration drive. There is no way the press or anyone will allowing the GOP to outreach to Hispanics if Amnesty is passed…so fight it.

Fight them on everything. Give them no quarter to pass bad legislation. Get Rubio ready to lead the charge to immigration reform and make it a voter issue in 2016 – but for the GOP. Rubio should become the face of the party.

Let’s start dictating the terms. Let the Dems to figure out what to do about their new turnout problem.

The system must crash. Americans have to experience the pain of the debt and inflation before they do anything about it. We tried telling them. All we can do is prepare for the inevitable and make sure liberty survives the impending collapse and rebirth.

1. Trust PPP
2. Stay away from the House of Ras.
3. Fox News is only pimping conservatives for ratings.
4. Rush is only pimping conservatives for ratings.
5. America is in fact a center left country.

HotAirLib on November 12, 2012 at 7:20 PM

1. Votes should be collected or counted by a computer.
2. PPP (D) was in collusion with whoever did the counting.
3. Voter ID laws have become a must.
4. America has reached a point of no return.

Many people sincerely rooting for Obama have the same mental problem as kids who pretend-play medieval fantasy: they see themselves in the role of rulers rather than peasants, of whom there was and always will be a huge majority.

I think the D pollsters were right for the wrong reason. I don’t think anybody could have predicted that repubs would have stayed home to the degree they did. It was the Superbowl, and the R’s chose to ride the pine. It wasn’t ORCA, it wasn’t the Romney campaign, it was stupid republican voters who for whatever reason, stayed the hell home on the 6th. After some soul-searching, I have come to believe it was for the best. You can’t undo 100 years of slow progressive entitlement creep slowly. It has to be done quickly, like removing a band-aid. Romney would never have been able to do it. We need to reach a crisis point, so average Americans feel the pain and finally understand what we have been trying to tell them. Prepare and wait.

Yes, and the stink is Rasmussen. They’ve been wildly off in two straight elections. Their big methodological hole is that they do not survey any cell-phone only users/households. Cell-phone only people are 26% of the country and growing, and are largely young and liberal. So any pollster that does not poll these people will end up with too high a Republican total.

Yes, and the stink is Rasmussen. They’ve been wildly off in two straight elections. Their big methodological hole is that they do not survey any cell-phone only users/households. Cell-phone only people are 26% of the country and growing, and are largely young and liberal. So any pollster that does not poll these people will end up with too high a Republican total.

AngusMc on November 12, 2012 at 8:18 PM

Did you read the other link (they are meant to be taken in tandem)? If so, how do you explain the results this election when they were right multiple times prior?

The system must crash. Americans have to experience the pain of the debt and inflation before they do anything about it. We tried telling them. All we can do is prepare for the inevitable and make sure liberty survives the impending collapse and rebirth.

Funny thing is, this is the second time the conservative arguments about polls leading up to the election turned out to be completely false. Fool me once? Definition of insanity?

I went back looking this evening. Here’s a gem from the evening of 2008:

Scary part is that from 538.com got the results right.
Lance Murdock on November 4, 2008 at 11:42 PM

Or another.

Congrats, but don’t expect us to go along with your program sir.
One other thing, I hope this puts an end to the silliness that permeated this thread during the past few days, i.e., “McCain will win easily,” “McCain will win in a landslide,” etc. etc. Nothing wrong with being positive even when the results were inevitable (as I knew they would be when Rove conceded the other day that the hill was “too tall” for McCain to overcome), but to behave as if it were just not possible for McCain to lose Ohio, Virginia, Florida, and all the others, then pick up Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Iowa was the height of foolishness.Next time the polls give us bad news, let’s not dismiss them so readily. They are reliable indicators of what will happen. This election certainly proved that.
Joe Pyne on November 4, 2008 at 11:44 PM

If the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, expecting a different result…I’d say liberalism fits the bill. The solution is always worse than the problem it attempts to fix.

If the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, expecting a different result…I’d say liberalism fits the bill. The solution is always worse than the problem it attempts to fix.
Mitsouko on November 12, 2012 at 8:45 PM

Very impressive quality dodge of the clear intention of the question and deflection to Liberalism’s fault.

Which seems to answer my question with a, “No, unfortunately we made the same mistakes in regards to polling that we did last time.”

The election was not lost in any sense of the word. Stolen? Yes, absolutely. On massive scale.

Let’s talk that or stop with this stupidity of “lost”. Nothing was lost. Everything was stolen.

The sooner we start talking about that the better off we will all be in future elections. We are allowing liberals to walk away with the steal perpetrated on all of us. I am not a fan of Mitt, by any measure, but we need to discuss what is really at fault here.

Only one person out there has the balls to say what needs to be said: Allen West.

GOP is dead, simply by the way they did everything they could to get rid of Allen West and Mia Love, among others. Liberal Lite is not the way to go forward, we must primary pretty much every member of GOP Congress. Marco Rubio the main target, even before Boehner and McConnell. It was no one but Rubio who stopped Newt in FL with his attack on Newt while allowing Romney free reign with lying ads. Rubio is nothing but Romney Lite, by any measure.

By staying silent on the subject of stolen election GOP is complicity with liberals. No other way to interpret it.

Give money to specific TEA Party and truly conservative candidates, not a penny to GOP. Not. A. Penny.

And we need to do something about counting votes. Unless we do, we are done. DONE.

Which seems to answer my question with a, “No, unfortunately we made the same mistakes in regards to polling that we did last time.”

Genuine on November 12, 2012 at 8:49 PM

No we did not, genius. For more than 2 weeks during early voting and then on election day EVERYONE, including liberals such as Gore, was talking about HUGE TURNOUT. Once the votes “disappeared” overnight or enhanced to the tune of 120% to 200% depending on precinct in FL, PA and OH, every idiot RINO out there bought liberal line about “GOP voters staying home”.

Right. We stayed home during 1-2 hour wait lines, which were not visible during 2008.

And we are asking why is it that liberals run circles around us. Because not only they treat us as idiots, it is that we allow them to do so.

I’ll say it again- not a chance Romney got fewer or even just as many votes as McCain. I watched McCain’s campaign, he was many times worse a performer and comunicator than Romney. And I was one of the biggest Romney bashers here, up until the Convention. Republicans were many times more engaged in this election. Anyone attempting to paint this outcome as a result Republican or Conservative apathy is just being revisionist.

The White House left a clue for anyone who cares to see it- Florida.

Polls overwhelmingly showed Romney winning. Either the White House screwed up and let the fraud get out of hand, or they left a clue deliberately. Like a serial killer leaving behind evidence to screw with cop’s heads.

If Allen West could get some attention by those on the Right who have the platform to bring his recount to national spotlight, it could be proven just what the White House was up to this time.

So, before the election, whenever I checked at Foxnews.com, Romney’s chances looked very good. At cnn.com, Obama’s chances looked good. At Hotair.com Romney looked like he was gonna win decisively. But in the Israeli media, which isn’t a news outlet for either the Democrats or Republicans, Obama kept being consistently touted as the leader in the polls (they also reported Romney as winning the 1st debate).

Objectively speaking, my conclusions based on this election polls experiment are:
1) If I want to know the reality, I gotta adjust whatever Hotair is reporting slightly to the left.
2) The [mainstream] Israeli press’s reporting on the US is a more useful gauge about what’s going on in the US than any American leftwing or rightwing news outfit.
3) Statistics is worse than “damn lies”

It is far more accurate to say that conservatives chose to trust national polling which tended to show Pres. Obama tied to narrowly losing over state polling which tended to show him winning. There were reasons to do so. Hindsight does not necessarily make those reasons unreasonable.

Well, if you had bothered to check Obama’s approval ratings, you should have anticipated that his Democratic supporters would turn out for him again. RCP reported almost 50% of the electorate (and 90+% of Democrats) approved of Obama’s job performance in the end, vs. 47% disapprove. These aren’t Carter-esque numbers by any stretch of the imagination.

It also makes sense to assume spending hundreds of millions on GOTV preparation would pay off for the incumbent party; it did for Bush in ’04 as well as the Gore/Clinton administration in 2000 after all.

Finally, the importance of demographics in Colorado and Nevada was entirely predictable. Democrats overperformed there even in 2010.

Voters just are not going to admit to a prejudice against Mormons. This is the dirty little secret of 2012 Presidential race. I don’t like this hypothesis but just wait awhile. Eventually someone will dig deep enough to find the evidence.

I was continually criticized for stating that Obama’s greatest strength was the race card which would make him nearly invincible.People who vociferously disagreed with me pointed out that “guilt stricken” white masochists in the privacy of the voting booth could not bring themselves to vote for four more years of Obama. Wrong!Others pointed out that because black and Hispanic job losses were more severe than whites, that these two groups would be “less energized” and vote for Obama and in vastly declining numbers. Wrong!Jewish voters too, because Obama’s policies threaten Israel’s very existence, would vote less for Obama both in numbers and in percentages. Wrong! Because of Obama’s continual Catholic bashing and pro-abortion stances, Catholics would vote for Obama in declining numbers. In fact, German and Polish Catholics in Minnesota and Wisconsin-to which must be added Italian Catholics in Pennsylvania & Ohio-helped re-elect Obama president.

The fact that Obama was in over his head as presiden5tt made no difference. Neither did a failed economy or a disastrous foreign policy-nor the coverup of various disasters which led to four deaths.The race card, is in fact, such a winning hand that were it not for term limits Obama might well be re-elected in 2016 despite anticipated future FUBARS. Don’t forget that a continual stream of illegals-virtually all voting Democratic when granted amnesty, will continue uninterrupted-swelling Obama’s base.The race card works only AGAINST white candidates *(or for black or Hispanic ‘Uncle Toms’ who run as Republicans)(. Bingo to HA bloggers who correctly analyzed that Romney lost votes because of his Mormon faith. Another factor.

The polls and the pundits (Rove, Morris, Barrone)all factored in the above assumptions incorrectly and that the CW that would destroy a white incumbent, would not stick to a Teflon-coated black one.

The RCP avg was essentially margin of error. It tilted to Obama in the last few days, which many attributed to Sandy. It turned out to be more lasting, in another odd parallel to 2004, when latest deciders broke to Bush.